Empowering Young Readers

Environmental responsibility is encouraged when young people are brought face-to-face with dilemmas and contested values, and encouraged to make up their own minds.  Engaging with fiction is a mechanism for this and can offer young people different perspectives and role models to consider.‘ (Bigger & Webb, 2011:409)

When we look at children’s literature in an ecocritical sense, there are certain aspects that should be present…

• (Literature that inspires) awe in attention to the natural world.
• The recognition that our inner nature can be understood in relation to external nature.
• An awareness of both nature as culture and culture as nature.

(Gifford, 2000:221).

• Narratives attempt to reconnect the reader with nature, so encouraging greater protective agency.
• Are ‘post-pastoral’, accurately informed by science, balancing intellectual engagement and emotional appeal.
• Highlight the dependence of the human species upon healthy ecosystems while sounding an alarm  call about ecosystemic fargility
• Propose alternative stories of partnership ethic and environmental sustainability.
• Attempt to provide pleasurable narratives which are accurately informed by science, and which balance intellectual engagement with emotional appeal.

(Gabriel, 2017)